As a twenty-year-old college student, I was a Protestant, Bible-reading, Jesus-loving young woman. Restless and desperately seeking God’s direction for my life, I told my mother I wanted to go on retreat. That summer she generously bought me a ticket to Paris, from which I was to take a train and then a bus to
Anaxagoras, also born near Miletus but then living in Athens for a time, agrees with Empedocles, his contemporary, that Parmenides was right about change: all that we call change is just a re-arranging. But nothing actually comes out of nothing or passes into nothing, for no-thing does not exist and so this is impossible. For
Next we look at Empedocles, who is influenced by his predecessors the Milesians, Pythagoras, Heraclitus as well as Parmenides. Empedocles holds that the soul is immoral, trapped in an earthly body of decay (think Pythagoras). The soul may purify itself and rise to higher and higher ranks of perfection. As for the material world, it
If Heraclitus asked the question of the one and the many, Parmenides gives us a rigid answer. He breaks with the method of the Milesians who began with observations from nature, and begins instead with a logical argument, prescinding from the senses. Reason tells us that what is, is one. And thus it cannot also
Heraclitus lived in Ephesus, not far from Miletus, around 500 B.C. Heraclitus is not so much interested to know the causes of many things—the causes of thunder, lightning, and earthquakes—but to know the one thing that underlies all these things. This, to him, is wisdom. For him, not only does he see what Anaximenes described
Mathematics is fundamental to the Pythagorean view. First, geometry originated in Egypt but was transformed in Greece. The Egyptians were flooded each year by the Nile, and so geometry (the study of land, as the name implies), was developed to help them retain their land boundaries. But when geometry was passed to the Greeks, who
One of my all-time favorites, Pythagoras is in my personal view the key to understanding the metaphysical tradition of ancient Greece. While I don’t think I would have been one of his followers if I had known him (he was an ascetic and required performing all sorts of purification rituals to detach us from this
The next noteworthy early Greek philosopher, Anaximenes, was an associate and follower of Anaximander. But if I were Anaximander, I would be pretty mad, accusing Anaximenes of ruining my metaphysics. Here is what one writer reports of Anaximenes: Anaximenes of Miletus, son of Eurystratus, and associate of Anaximander, also says that the underlying nature of
Aristotle draws a distinction between the poets who concerned themselves with the gods versus the philosophers who concerned themselves with the investigation of nature. Having started with Hesiod the poet, we will now concern ourselves with Thales. Thales is hailed as the first philosopher. He was a citizen of Miletus, an Ionian city-state on the
Hesiod and Homer are the earliest Greek writers of the classical period, both of whom wrote in the 8th century B.C. Homer’s poems are mostly concerned with the stories of particular men and what they achieved and suffered. Hesiod, on the other hand, was concerned with the larger order of the world and its origin,
Why have some people sought metaphysics? Being a materialist has a certain reasonability: “What you can detect with the senses exists; everything else is fiction.” Logical, right? Well, this view has been unsatisfying to vast swaths of people over the millennia (including me), and for varying reasons. It is astonishing when you think of how
Materialists have always existed. Weinberg is nothing new. In the ancient world, materialism was in vogue for hundreds of years. We are going to explore ancient versions of materialism to set the stage and then watch the BIRTH OF METAPHYSICS [*]. In the process, we will see how metaphysical thinkers dared to posit a world
Steven Weinberg, a theoretical physicist at the University of Texas, is a Nobel laureat in physics and has been called the pre-immanent theoretical physicist alive today. Having discussed the ambiguity around the end of the universe, whether it will collapse or fizzle out, he writes: However, all these problems may be resolved, and whichever
Like Virgil descending into the lowermost circles of Hell, I descended into the depths of my daughters’ room. Three of my teenage girls share the space and I had to wade through a fair amount of makeup, pens, earbuds and school notebooks in order to locate them, but there they were: my Introduction to Early
Plato’s Phaedo affords what I consider one of the most important philosophical validations that pertains to motherhood. Motherhood is about love: a selfless self-emptying for another, not because the child has earned or deserved it, but simply by the very fact of being the mother’s child. By virtue of existing as her child, she is loved. One
Aristotle was concerned with human happiness. Aristotle’s word for “happiness” is eudaimonia, which is better translated “flourishing.” An acorn that falls into the ground, sprouts, grows deep roots and tall branches has eudaimonia. As an acorn it had potential, and as it grows into a tall oak tree, that potential becomes actualized. The little acorn
One of the most important passages in the whole corpus of western philosophy was written by Plato who describes the final hours of the life of Socrates, Plato’s mentor and friend. Socrates had been condemned to death by Athens for “corrupting the youth,” a sentence his followers believe is false, and hence his death is,
John Paul II goes on to emphasize that the family—comprised of mothers, fathers and children—is the specific way that humans are made in the image of God: God creates by the power of his word: “Let there be…!” (e.g., Gen 1:3). Significantly, in the creation of man this word of God is followed by these
John Paul II develops this illumination of motherhood through the fatherhood of God: “When in union with the apostle, we bow our knees before the Father from whom all fatherhood and motherhood is named (cf. Eph 3:14-15), we come to realize that parenthood is the event whereby the family. . . is brought about ‘in
In his Letter to Families, John Paul II charts new theological territory, exploring ways that motherhood is made in the image of God and reflects God’s creative power. His letter opens with a reference to God’s creation of the world: “The universe, immense and diverse as it is, the world of all living beings, is
I have taught Anaxagoras since my first class as a grad student to the present. Whenever I teach Plato’s Phaedo and give Socrates’ account of his conversion from “natural philosophy” to the development of his own “makeshift” theory of causation (read “Plato’s Forms”) I mention Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras and his theory of Mind were tantalizing to the